Book Excerpt: The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications

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Following nearly a decade of stagnation, the world of browsers is once more a raging battlefield. In a manner all too reminiscent of the First Browser Wars in the late 1990s, vendors compete by bringing new features to market monthly. The main difference is that security is now seen as a clear selling point.

Of course, objectively measuring the robustness of any sufficiently complex piece of software is an unsolved problem in computing, doubly so if your codebase happens to carry almost two decades worth of bloat. Therefore, much of the competitive effort goes into inventing and then rapidly deploying new security-themed additions, often with little consideration for how well they actually solve the problem they were supposed to address.

In the meantime, standards bodies, mindful of their earlier misadventures, have ditched much of their academic rigor in favor of just letting a dedicated group of contributors tweak the specifications as they see fit. There is talk of making HTML5 the last numbered version of the standard and transitioning to a living document that changes every day—often radically. The relaxation of the requirement has helped keep ongoing much of the work around W3C and WHATWG, but it has also undermined some of the benefits of having a central organization to begin with. Many recent proposals gravitate toward quick, narrowly scoped hacks that do not even try to form a consistent and well-integrated framework. When this happens, no robust feedback mechanism is in place to allow external experts to review reasonably stable specifications and voice concerns before any implementation work takes place. The only way to stay on top of the changes is to immerse oneself in the day-to-day dynamics of the working group.

It is difficult to say if this new approach to standardization is a bad thing. In fact, its benefits may easily outweigh any of the speculative risks; for one, we now have a chance at a standard that is reasonably close to what browsers actually do. Nevertheless, the results of this frantic and largely unsupervised process can be unpredictable, and they require the security community to be very alert.

In this spirit, the last part of the book will explore some of the more plausible and advanced proposals that may shape the future of the Web . . . or that may just as likely end up in the dustbin of history a few years from now.#!

16New and Upcoming Security Features

You will soon find out that there is little rhyme and reason to how all the new browser features mesh, but we still need to organize the discussion in some way. Perhaps the best approach is to look at their intended purposes and begin with all the mechanisms created specifically to tweak the Web’s security model for a well-defined gain.

The dream of inventing a brand-new browser security model is strong within the community, but it is always followed by the realization that it would require rebuilding the entire Web. Therefore, much of the practical work focuses on more humble extensions to the existing approach, necessarily increasing the complexity of the security-critical sections of the browser codebase. This complexity is unwelcome, but its proponents invariably see it as justified, whether because they aim to mitigate a class of vulnerabilities, build a stopgap for some other hard problem that nobody wants to tackle right now, or simply enable new types of applications to be built in the future.